What's cooking? part 4

coconut is milk produced by cows with large udders (or "coconuts")

taste of thai green curry paste is kind of shit :(

making your own is kind of a pain, but worth it if you have the time. can post a recipe that's worked well if you want.

^^^I would like recipe pls

from Hot Sour Salty Sweet. this is supposed to be enough for four curries, however i forgot that and used ALL of it for one curry. it was fine, perhaps because i didn't mash finely enough and didn't use enough shrimp paste.

You can use a food processor instead of mortar and pestle if it'll get stuff fine enough.

Green curry paste

1tbsp coriander seeds
2 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp black peppercorns
.25 cup minced coriander roots
1.5 tsp salt
.5 cup minced lemongrass (4 to 8 stalks)
.25 cup coarsely chopped garlic
.25 cup coarsely chopped shallots
2 tbsp chopped galangal, or sub 1tbsp minced ginger + 1tbsp fresh lime juice
1tbsp minced wild lime zest, or sub regular lime zest
.5 cup fresh bird chiles (preferably green ones), stemmed & coarsely chopped
1tbsp shrimp paste

Place a heavy skillet over med-high heat. Add the coriander seeds and dry-roast, stirring frequently with a wooden spoon, until aromatic and beginning to change color, about 3 min. Transfer to a mortar or spice grinder and grind to a powder, then set aside. Use the same method to dry-roast the cumin seeds, about 1 min, then grind to a powder and add to the ground coriander. Grind the peppercorns and add to the spice mixture.

Use a large mortar to reduce the ingredients to a paste: Place the coriander roots in the mortar with a pinch of the salt and pound until well softened and breaking down. Add the lemongrass and pound until it is well mashed. Add the garlic and another pinch of the salt and continue pounding. Once the garlic is shapeless and breaking down, add the shallots and continue until broken down. Add the galangal and lime zest and pound and mash with another pinch of salt to a coarse paste. Add the spice blend and mash and pound until well combined. Add the chopped chiles and the remaining salt and pound until broken down and smooth. Set aside.

Place the shrimp paste on a piece of aluminum foil about 8x4 inches. Spread it out in a thin layer, then fold the foil over it to seal and make a flat package. Place a heavy skillet over high heat, put the foil package in the skillet, and cook for about 3 min on the first side, pressing it down onto the hot surface. Turn over and repeat on the other side. You should start to smell the hot shrimp past.

NB don't seal all the edges of the foil package when folding, or it will expand with heat like a bag of popcorn, not good.

Remove from the heat, unwrap, and add to the curry paste blend. Pound or stir thoroughly to blend. You'll smell all the aromas in the curry paste as it mixes with the hot shrimp paste.

Store the curry paste in a clean, dry, well-sealed glass jar in the refrigerator. It should keep for about a month.

Makes 1 cup paste

That sounds like a great project for a gray winter weekend.

Monday night, it seemed like a good idea to put 18 lbs of pork shoulder into the slow cooker and let it simmer away for 24 hours. Realized last night that 18 lbs of cooked pork is WEEKS worth of the same stuff every night. Got some completely fabulous pork broth out of it though, time for posole or albondigas. Tonight I need to bake some kind of pumpkin almond (and/or coconut) flour quick bread that will be good for a few days worth of breakfasts. Maybe with some flax thrown in for xtra-healthiness factor.

Ya coconut milk is compeltely vegan

It is also incredibly, horribly high in saturated fat or cholestorol or something.

trayce it sounds like your kitchen is like mine. it has room to move i guess but no counter space. i've just gotten resigned to small kitchens until i can buy my own house.

Not really. It's full of a medium chain fat called lauric acid. And only animal products have any cholesterol. (xp)

Yeah I was thinking cholestorol was the animal one, I couldnt think what it was called.

Just made my BF an Italian pinwheel steak (stuffed w/ ham, provolone, spinach and fresh basil) and broccoli w/ cheese sauce made from cheddar, white truffle oil, milk and stilton.

you are rocking that white truffle oil! And that sounds totally delicious.

i am crazy about white truffle oil!

i have black too, but i neglect it

that sounds like a super decadent meal!

lukas, thanks for the curry past recipe! i definitely want to try that at some point.

i used white truffle oil tonight too, but on a somewhat dull pasta dish that needed a little something extra. (linguine, olives, oo, tomatoes, basil, toasted pine nuts, garlic, parmesan = available ingredients)

well he waited an hour to eat it so it probably sucked lol

im anti-truffle oil :(

Oh I just bought Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet! Have not cooked anything from it yet--need more recs!

well i liked:

-green duck curry
-holy basil chicken
-luang prabang fusion salad
-stir-fried pork and tomato

really the only thing I've cooked from it that I didn't love was the jungle curry pork, but then I've never found a Thai jungle curry that I've loved.

yeah i dont understand the appeal of jungle curries either

When I went on the Chile Pepper Institute tour in September, one thing they had in the gift shop was chile powder made from a new variety they've developed, the NuMex Heritage 6-4. They claim to have bred 5x the flavor compounds into these chiles -- the director said he never made enchilada sauce with anything else. So I bought a 4 oz. pkg. at the time and finally made a batch of enchilada sauce and enchiladas tonight and OH DAAAAMMMMMNNN I gotta get some more of this stuff. It's like fruity spicy brick-red cocaine.

Quince, I totally adore the shrimp and pasta recp with tomatoes, anchovies, slivered bell peps, capers, etc. Have made it prob 20 times or something! Great cookbk if you can source all the ingreds, tbh. I bought tamarind paste because of that book, although sadly it languished in my fridge unused bc I couldn't find the rest of the nec spices.

Still not found a local source for the whatsit lime leaves.

I bought a quarter of an organic grass-fed Dexter cow yesterday. Raised maybe ten miles from here by a skinny young farmer who looks like Ted Leo with a giant beard. I'm going to split it with my neighbor but that'll still leave me with like 22 pounds of random cuts and packages of ground beef. Haven't cooked any yet but I'm very excited about this.

wowwwww

is the farmer gonna butcher it for you or

Made an Elizabeth David recipe for risotto.stewed chicken,onion,tomatoes,a pepper,mushroom,a bit of Bacon,celery,glass of white wine,thyme for 2 hours then added it near the end of cooking the arborio plus some butter and parmesan.

Yeah it's butchered - there's a meat processor / storage place near here that does his stuff for him. It's all packaged and frozen already, stored in my basement freezer. I haven't even looked at it all yet to figure out what we have.

should keep you busy for the winter!

wish i had a massive freezer so i could do that!

A guest at my house made a unique soup last night with things I never would have put together. The taste of it was actually great and warming and wonderful and I am 100% grateful to him for sharing his cooking & hospitality w us cos he's a rad dude, but mentally I couldn't get over the fact that there were cooked chunks of cucumber in my hot soup, along with canned corn and ground beef.

However with a few alterations I may adopt his recipe, because, my mental food issues aside, it tasted awesome and had things I would never have thought to try, and I need to break out of my mirepoix & soup bones rut a little bit.

Oh I just bought Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet! Have not cooked anything from it yet--need more recs!

― quincie, Thursday, October 28, 2010 12:24 PM

does it have relatively easy to make stuff or is it all about having you grind your own curry pastes out of 30 ingredients you can't find anywhere

most of the stuff in this book is really easy to make. i am a very inexperienced cook and i can get good results with this book consistently. (like last night - tofu in hot chili oil yum.)

you can find all the essential ingredients for most recipes no problem. (otoh every time i make anything i'm like "guess i can skip the kaffir lime leaves")

the green curry thing is just a fun project if you have extra time.

Yeah I mean I made the Vietnamese lemongrass chicken soup once -- I left out the things I couldn't find, so basically in the end it tasted just like normal chicken soup with some lemongrass in it? It was still good soup but it didn't have that "spices of the Orient!" mystery flavor. But for that, I guess you need...the actual spices in question, so... If you never had and never had any desire to have black cardamom in your arsenal, maybe make something else?

yeah what i would say is that finding a few key ingredients can go a long way. you'd be surprised how far you can go with eg fish sauce, fresh lime juice and fresh chilis.

ok i'll check it out. i found kaffir lime leaves at one place but they're too overpowering imo. still searching for non-barfy fish sauce brand

You can use the green part of a regular lime's peel as a sub for the kaffir leaves. I don't grate it like zest, but slice it off in little chunks. It is not a flawless sub but it is better than nothing.

I have never had any desire to make my own curry paste though because that Mae Ploy stuff is so cheap.

I am a big fan of Squid brand fish sauce but maybe you shouldn't be taking advice from someone who can't smell it.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_TgrbPuulNfc/SmoXg7zzQYI/AAAAAAAAANg/7u-T7o6QPBk/s400/41GZr-RXbmL._SL500_AA280_.jpg

lime juice works for me. ive searched everywhere for mae ploy pastes, short of ordering online. squid i'll probably try next, tiparos brand is too obvious about being liquid death warmed over

My housemate is ill, so I decided he needed some kind of nourishing broth, so I made a brothy soup out of all the random greens I had to hand - cabbage mostly, some celery, cubed potato and some spinach, with loads of garlic and thyme.

Much to my suprise it was delicious. It'd be better with homemade chicken stock but I didnt have any so I had to make do with Massell vege stock.

i buy my mae ploy pastes at cub foods of all places. used to get my galanga root there, too, but they just stopped carrying it.

i think squid brand is supposedly pretty decent? i haven't tried it. so far every fish sauce brand i've picked up at whim has been a bit overly fishy...richin, um, i forget the others. i just can't bring myself to throw out my current bottle for a new one until it's gone cuz i'm weird about wasting stuff.

has anyone used golden boy fish sauce? i made a mental note about it after reading something...somewhere.

i'm lots of help.

am0n potung has maesri and i think mae ploy curry paste. i usually use maesri and most of them are good except the karee one? it's like yellow-brown and tastes like indian curry.

you can't buy golden boy fish sauce

I got Squid brand -- I think some tv chef recommended it -- and like it a lot.

I always get Three Crab Brand - it's still foul ass in a bottle because hey it's fish sauce, but it's mellower than some of the overly strong other ones I've tried. Kind of sweeter tasting.

It's labled 'nuoc mam nhi', and I've heard the 'nhi' means its the extra virgin olive oil of fish sauce - the first fermentation and supposedly better quality, that you use for sauces more than cooking.

I haven't looked through Hot Salty Sour Sweet in a long time. I've been jonesing to go through cookbooks again and find things I missed or never sounded good the last time I looked at them.

potung didn't have mae ploy last time i was there and not really into the maesri cans. they also don't have golden boy or tra chang sauces. they suck.

i've avoided 3 crabs since reading this http://www.thaifoodandtravel.com/features/fishsauce1.html

I do not personally recommend Three Crabs Brand, which several Asian cookbook authors recommend, mainly because it does not appear to be a naturally fermented fish sauce but is, rather, a flavor-enhanced, processed food product. According to the label, hydrolyzed wheat protein and fructose are among the ingredients – both are additives that have not been adequately time-tested for their potential long-term effects on health. Their inclusion suggests that the sauce is made through the process of hydrolysis, whereby a catalyst (sometimes from chemical sources) is added to hasten fermentation, allowing the company to produce large quantities of the product in shorter periods of time than would be required in natural fermentation.

It also appears suspicious that the label states that the fish sauce is a product of Thailand but is "processed in Hong Kong," further indicating that it is more highly processed than naturally fermented fish sauce. When compared with high-quality, naturally fermented fish sauces, the additives in Three Crabs Brand, to the discerning palate, gives this fish sauce a somewhat metallic, artificial after-taste. Since there are a number of excellent natural fish sauces, produced as has been traditionally done for generations, on the market, my preference is to stay with the traditionally made and time-tested products.

Oh weird - I started buying it ages ago because I'd read some of those cookbook author recommendations and never really thought about it afterward. I don't get any weird aftertaste but maybe I'm just used to it.

But yeah, it's one of those things that really should have like two ingredients in it, I should check out others.

you can't buy golden boy fish sauce

― john water (harbl), Thursday, 4 November 2010 23:18 (Yesterday)

wait you can't? i could swear a place down the road from me has it.

anyway, http://importfood.com/satc2408.html

keeping my eye out for ^

When I went on the Chile Pepper Institute tour in September, one thing they had in the gift shop was chile powder made from a new variety they've developed, the NuMex Heritage 6-4. They claim to have bred 5x the flavor compounds into these chiles

Would be a perfect xmas present for my dad, thanks. Hope I can buy them online somewhere.